Roof Rot Repair in San Antonio, TX

Look at the eave first. Roof rot repair nearly always starts at the edge, because water runs downhill, and on most houses it collects where the fascia, the sub-fascia behind it, the soffit underneath and the rafter tips all come together. Once water slips behind the gutter or under that last row of shingles, the wood stays damp for days after each rain. A few summers of heat and humidity later, it's soft. Then spongy. Then it crumbles in your hand.

We find the same five trouble spots on houses of every age around San Antonio. Eaves without drip edge are the big one, since older roofs often went without. Then gutters stuffed with live oak leaves, which spill behind the gutter and not into it. Rake boards on gable ends take wind-driven rain sideways. Porch roofs that tie into the house at a low angle hold water at the joint. And valleys dump two slopes' worth of runoff onto one short piece of fascia.

Bungalows and ranch houses from the South Side to Alamo Heights also carry decades of paint on their trim, which can hide rot right up until a board gives.

You don't need a ladder for most of this. Pick a dry afternoon, walk around the house and look up. Here's what to watch for:

• Blistered or peeling paint on the fascia, often right behind a gutter seam or a downspout.
• A gutter that sags or pulls loose because the screws have nothing solid left to grab.
• Soffit that droops, stains dark or has gaps where wasps, squirrels or birds now come and go.
• A wavy roof edge.
• On homes with open eaves, dark streaks or soft spots on the rafter tails.

Then grab a flashlight and go into the attic. Point it at the eaves. Dark, stained wood where the rafters sit on top of the wall means water's been getting in for a while.

Stains out in the middle of the roof are a different problem, usually the sheathing, and that's covered on our roof decking replacement page. If water is actively dripping, start with a roof leak repair. Why rebuild wood that'll just get wet again next week?

With edge rot, the shingles are often fine. The roof may well have years left. So you probably don't need a new roof at all, just solid carpentry and a water source that's been shut off. This is how we do it.

1. Probe and mark. The estimator works an awl into every foot of fascia and every rafter tail he can reach, marks the soft sections and photographs them for you.
2. Lift the first courses. Our crew takes down the gutter and lifts the drip edge and bottom rows of shingles to get at the top of the fascia and the eave end of the decking.
3. Cut back to dry wood. Rotted fascia, sub-fascia and soffit come out, and bad ends get cut off the rafter tails. If a tail has lost its end, we sister a new piece alongside and fasten it well past the damage.
4. Replace eave decking if needed. Rot that reached the first sheet of decking means we cut that strip out and patch in the same thickness.
5. Rebuild and seal. New primed fascia and soffit go up. Every cut end gets primed before it goes on the house, and new drip edge sends water into the gutter, not behind it.
6. Relay and rehang. Shingles go back down and seal. Where an old one can't be reused, we match it with Owens Corning or GAF stock. Then the gutter's rehung with the right pitch toward the downspouts.

Rot across most of the roof changes things, and we'll tell you. A full replacement usually makes more sense then, and our roof repair team will walk you through the numbers before you commit.

Some addresses come with paperwork. In San Antonio, the Office of Historic Preservation requires a Certificate of Appropriateness for exterior work in its historic districts, King William and Monte Vista among them, and reviewers there do look at trim profiles. The small cities have rules of their own. Alamo Heights, for one, lists reshingling and redecking as work that needs a city permit. We check what applies to your address before cutting anything. On older homes we match the existing fascia profile, rather than nailing up whatever board is on the truck.

Insurance is where people get their hopes up, so let's be straight. Most homeowner policies call rot from a slow, long-running leak wear and tear, and they don't pay for it. A storm that ripped off shingles or flashing and let water in is another matter, and the damage after it may belong on the claim. Our team has 30+ years of insurance claim experience and can usually tell which side of that line you're on after one look. If it looks covered, our insurance claims process picks it up from there. If not, we'll tell you so and price the carpentry as a plain repair. Across 2,800+ projects, hearing that early has saved a lot of people a denied claim.

Soft fascia on your house? Request a free estimate and let us know which side it's on.